Postgraduate Research in Linguistics

Postgraduate research is central to what we do and the postgraduate student community forms an important and lively part of our research culture. Our postgraduate students study a wide range of topics linked to staff expertise. We are a member of the AHRC-funded Northern Bridge Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership and this offers further opportunities, including for Collaborative Doctoral Award Projects. Our students also benefit from connections with a range of partners, including with primary and secondary schools and colleges, and with language teaching institutions.

We offer a dynamic postgraduate training programme covering a wide range of research and career development activities and skills. We also run a bespoke teaching shadowing scheme, in which PhD students receive training and gain teaching and marking experience by shadowing a member of staff and teaching seminar sessions over the course of a semester. Our students regularly join the committee which organises the Newcastle and Northumbria Postgraduate Conference.

If you are interested in postgraduate study with us, please contact Dr Phillip Wallage: phillip.wallage@northumbria.ac.uk.

To find out more about our current PhD students, please visit our Postgraduate Studies page. 

Recently completed PhD projects

Fatuma Abulkader, ‘An investigation of Saudi EFL teachers’ and learners’ perceptions of implementing Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) at university level’

Sameeha Al-Ahmadi, The Effect of Gender on the Nativisation and Lexical Density of Tweets by Saudi Bloggers: A Corpus-Based Study’

Amina Al-Dhaif, ‘Syrian refugees in the UK: a journey of linguistic and socio-cultural identity construction’

Mumtaz Ali, ‘Investigating Pakistani university students’ level of Willingness to Communicate (WTC) in English: a case study of students from the Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Sindh (SALU)’

Qianwen Cheng, ‘Family of Chinese BA-constructions: a cognitive approach’

Eleni Janko, ‘The effect of L1 literacy on the acquisition of L2 oral skills’

Gerrit Kotzur, ‘Disablism at Work: A Critical Discourse and Biographical Narrative Study of Blind and Partially Sighted People’s Professional Identities in the UK and Germany’

Heng Li, ‘Cultural and Individual Differences in Metaphorical Representations of Time’

Hui-Ching Lin, ‘Prepositions in phrasal verbs: a cognitive linguistic approach to meaning constructions in the EFL context’

Luca Miorelli, ‘The Development of Morpho-Syntactic Competence in Italian-speaking Children: A Usage-Based Approach’

Theng Theng Ong, ‘The construction of Malaysian Airlines tragedies MH370 and MH17 in the Malaysian and British newspapers: a multidisciplinary study’

Judith Taylor, ‘Language Attitudes, Stereotypes and Ingroup Membership: Examining Young People’s Perception of their Speech Community in Newcastle-upon-Tyne’

Kingsley Ugwuanyi, ‘English language ownership perceptions of speakers of Nigerian English’ 

Lifang Wei, ‘A study of the use of requests in British and Chinese university classrooms: Forms, functions and responses’